


Merry Christmas, Darling

by lizandletdie



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Christmas, F/M, Light cheating, Romance, Romantic Comedy, Small Towns
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-17
Updated: 2018-12-17
Packaged: 2019-09-20 23:38:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,790
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17032101
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lizandletdie/pseuds/lizandletdie
Summary: It's been a year since her mother died, and Belle French is back home for the holidays without her fiance in tow. It's hard to balance old traditions with new circumstances, especially when fate keeps bringing her together with the pawn shop owner, Dominick Gold.





	Merry Christmas, Darling

Storybrooke, Maine didn’t have an airport. Returning home for the holidays was a four hour flight from New Haven to Bangor, followed by a seventy minute drive in a rental car to the one bed & breakfast in the town she’d grown up in. It had been a concession to keep everyone happy, her father had wanted her to come home for the holidays and Gaston hadn’t wanted to sleep in her childhood bedroom. So, she’d made the reservation and everything had been okay, until Thanksgiving when Gaston had surprised her with reservations for a romantic Christmas ski trip to Utah. It had been a huge fight, which escalated into her coming to Storybrooke for Christmas and him doing...whatever the hell he was planning to do. Ostensibly, he was going to Utah but she honestly didn’t know what his plans were.

The worst part was that honestly she wouldn’t have minded _going_ to Utah if he’d actually discussed it with her ahead of time and if it had been any other year, but her mother had died suddenly just before Christmas last year and this was going to be her first “real” holiday without her after having been in a fog for most of the previous one. She didn’t want to leave her father alone this year, and beyond that she _needed_ to be back in Storybrooke and to have as much of a proper holiday as she could. It felt like her fiance should understand that, but then again they had only just started dating at the time and then he’d been in China for three months for work and by the time he was back she was through the worst of it.

She honestly wasn’t even sure why she was staying at the bed & breakfast, except that she’d made the reservation and was trying super hard to pretend like everything was going exactly according to plan. It was the sort of white lie adulthood seemed to bring more and more as she got older – everything was going to be okay.

Still, she wasn't going to let Gaston’s absence get her down. If he didn’t want to be with her for Christmas, that was his problem and not hers and she honestly didn’t want to think about it. Really, all she wanted to do by the time she’d finally checked into her room after a whole day of travel was get something to eat at the attached diner and then maybe call her dad and see if he was done with work yet.

The lunch rush seemed to have mostly ebbed by the time she had gotten settled into the room, so she ordered herself a sandwich and tea and sat at the counter to eat her lunch. She didn’t pay too much attention to the goings-on around her as people came in and out. It had been a long, lonely trip here and it was just nice to have the stress of travel lifted at last.

A muffled expletive hit her ears just ahead of the splash of coffee that hit her shoes and the ankles of her jeans. She instinctively recoiled, but the thick cotton absorbed the worst of the heat. She looked up automatically and saw a strange man standing next to her looking horrified. He looked weirdly familiar, but she couldn’t quite place him. He was nice looking, though, with longish silver hair and warm brown eyes.

“I am _so_ sorry,” he said quickly.

“Don’t worry about it,” she replied, still trying to place him. “No harm done.”

“Still, let me buy your lunch.”

“Oh, no, you don’t need to.”

“It’s honestly the least I can do.” He was already fumbling with his wallet and pulling out a few bills which the waitress didn’t immediately take, instead looking at Belle and waiting for her assent before she accepted them.

“Thank you. I’m Belle, by the way.”

“Dominick,” he replied, reaching out to take her hand. “Dominick Gold.”

It suddenly occurred to Belle how she’d known him, Mr. Gold had been a fixture in town since she could remember, though she’d never had much to do with him. He ran the pawn shop down the street from her father’s flower shop and his son had been a few years behind her in school, though they hadn’t been friends. The waitress returned with another cup of coffee for him, which he checked the lid on before taking it from the counter.

“I’ll leave you to your lunch,” he said. “It was nice meeting you, Belle.”

“Nice meeting you, too. Merry Christmas.”

“Merry Christmas.”

~❄~❄~❄~

Dominick couldn’t place who Belle might be related to, but he was sure she was related to somebody in the town even if she hadn’t given her surname. No one came to Storybrooke in the winter unless they were coming home. It was a nice little puzzle, but not one he was planning to be overly concerned with. He had his own holidays to plan, and this year his son had decided to spend with his mother in Tempe, so it was going to be a very quiet celebration. It wouldn’t be the first Christmas spent alone, and he doubted he would be the last, either. That was the price one paid for not being able to live in the same state as an ex and never having remarried, after all.

He wasn’t planning on doing much for Christmas, but that didn’t mean he didn’t have things to keep him busy during the lead-up to the holiday. He had a shop to run and properties that needed attention.

The annual Snowflake Festival was that evening, and even with his son grown and in another state he still felt obligated to go. It was a tradition, and somehow it didn’t feel right to skip it even if he was going to be wandering alone. Still, it was nice to get out of the house and see the lights. The Snowflake Festival went back to sometime in the 70s when the city was temporarily home to a cult and suddenly city officials needed to be more inclusive around holidays. The cult had eventually moved out west someplace, but Snowflake Festival had stayed. It was a local tradition now, even if there were decidedly fewer essential oils and organic jams now.

He was taking a break and getting a hot chocolate from one of the tents when he heard a familiar voice behind him.

“We have to stop meeting like this.” He turned and saw Belle from earlier standing behind him with a smirk on her face and a paper cup with steam coming off of it in her hands.

Somehow, he couldn’t speak for just a second when he first saw her. She’d been pretty in the diner, but the cold and snow had put a rosy tint on her cheeks that hadn’t been there before, and really everyone looked better with the diffused glow of light from the hundred different light sources. So it really wasn’t particularly surprising that his breath caught in his throat for just that first moment, but he recovered.

“I’m glad to see your boots survived the coffee.” She smiled at his joke, and he couldn’t resist smiling back. “So how has your visit been so far? Enjoying the local color?”

“Something like that,” she replied. “I’m helping my father run his booth, so it’s just like high school all over again.”

He had a sudden flash of recognition and a gangly teenager looking bored amidst a sea of poinsettias, mistletoe, and holly.

“Oh! You’re the florist’s daughter!”

“Yeah, that’s me.” She looked a little abashed at the admission, glancing down into her cup and then away before settling her gaze back on him.

He suddenly remembered that last Christmas there hadn’t been a booth of poinsettias here, and then the reason for it hit him. “I was so sorry to hear about your mother. She was a lovely woman.”

She looked away again, and he pretended not to notice that she was getting her emotions back in check before responding.

“Thank you.”

It was an awkward moment, and maybe he shouldn’t have said anything but he had and even with all the unpleasantness with his father he’d have appreciated the gesture after Malcolm’s funeral.

“So how long are you in town for?” he asked once she seemed to have gotten back to normal.

“Through the new year. I figured I’d help out with the shop while I can, I’m getting married this summer so…” She shrugged, and let her voice trail off. He wasn’t really sure what she meant by it, but there wasn’t anything in the list of polite conversational topics for near strangers he could think of to question it. In fact, there was really only one thing to continue with.

“Congratulations on the engagement.”

“Thanks!” She didn’t seem particularly enthused by the idea of it, but that wasn’t really his business and he had just brought up her dead mother, so he didn’t think too much of it. The small talk stalled, and he started looking around for an excuse to go away but then she came up with one of her own. “I should probably get back to the booth to help my father. I just took a break to get some cocoa.”

“Of course, yeah. Nice chatting with you, though.”

“You too, Mr. Gold. Have a merry Christmas, okay?”

“Merry Christmas, Ms. French.”

She waved as she turned to go back towards the florist booth, and it couldn’t help feeling a little flash of _something_ in his chest. He tried to push it away on impulse, whatever it was he didn’t want to think about it too much. He had his own life to worry about right now, and there was no sense in getting personally involved with this girl who he barely knew.

~❄~❄~❄~

Belle had been away from small town life too long, and she’d forgotten some of the local politics. She’d accepted an invitation for a dinner party with a girl she’d gone to high school with and figured it would be a great way to catch up with the old group. However, she had _not_ realized what half the guests had, which was that this was also going to be a sales pitch for a multi-level marketing scheme where a presenter showed up and started trying to sell them on essential oils. Belle hadn’t been born when the Congregation of the Prophet had been a major force in town, but there had still been a few stragglers who hadn’t left until the early 90s and she still had a lingering suspicion of the alternative medicine they’d peddled which had included a lot of handmade essential oils. And even if she had been into essential oils, she definitely wasn’t interested in expensive ones sold by a stranger trying to push her into it.

“They just have _so_ many uses!” the seller said as Belle took a divinity cookie off the plate and surreptitiously checked her phone. “You can even use them in cooking in place of unnatural extracts. For example, there’s almond essential oil in the divinities!”

Belle paused with the cookie midway to her mouth and glanced at it quickly before putting it back on her plate. She wasn’t sure if anyone else here was having a good time, but she would literally rather be anyplace else, and it was every woman for herself on this one. Finally, they all split off to ‘sample the products’ and then individually go off onto a side sofa to place an order. She had no intention of actually ordering anything, but she very much didn’t want to have to actually talk about it with this stranger who was going to try to hard sell her. She was going to somehow have to get out of here without anyone actually seeing her leave.

After about twenty minutes, Belle was running out of ways to dodge. Everyone else was buying diffusers and whatever else was being sold. At one point she’d gone to the bathroom, but the window was too high and small for her to climb out of and there wasn’t a ledge anyway.

“Belle, are you ready to order?” the product rep asked as soon as she’d left the bathroom, and she froze. There was only one thing she could think to say at this point, and it was going to be awkward.

“Yeah, sure. Do you mind if I go outside and smoke real quick?”

“Um, sure,” Mary Margaret replied. “You can go out on the fire escape if you want.”

Everyone looked at her like she’d grown a second head, but nobody stopped her as she walked to the door and picked up her purse before retreating to the window next to the fire escape and climbing out. It was a long way to the ground, but there was a ladder and Belle was halfway down it before she realized she’d forgotten her coat inside. And she was _absolutely_ not going back to get it at this point. She could buy another coat, but socially speaking there was really no coming back from sneaking out of a party-slash-sales pitch via fire escape.

She’d forgotten how cold it was in her haste to get away, and by the time she was back at the diner she was frozen and shivering.

“I need a hot chocolate, please,” she said to the waitress as soon as she got to the counter. Back in high school, this had been where her friend Ruby worked but she hadn’t seen Ruby on this trip and honestly wasn’t sure where she was and hadn’t had the guts to ask after her yet. Too many things had changed since she’d last lived here already.

The warm beverage did its job, and by the time she’d had half the cup she was warm enough to possibly maintain a conversation.

“Hey, do you know where I can buy a coat around here?” she asked the waitress next time she came back. “I lost mine.”

The short-haired blonde looked at her like she was crazy for a second. “Well, there’s The Queen’s Closet across town. But Mr. Gold has some clothes in the shop if you don’t mind second-hand and he’s just down the street.”

Belle didn’t mind second-hand, and more than that she _really_ didn’t want to have to go across down in a sweater and tights. So, for the third time in two days she’d be seeing Dominick Gold.

~❄~❄~❄~

 _Mr. Gold’s Pawn Shop_ was half a block away from the bed & breakfast, and he usually at least got coffee there on his way to work. In winter, though, he’d go more often. It was the easiest way to get a warm meal at midday without going to his house, though sometimes he’d just pop out for a coffee if things were slow. In fact, he had his key in the lock so he could step out for that exact purpose when Belle French, the florist’s daughter, came sprinting down the sidewalk and almost ran into him.

He was actually impressed that she was able to move so fast and stop so suddenly wearing heeled boots, and the snow was clinging to her hair and her sweater in a very distracting way but then he realized she wasn’t wearing a winter coat which brought him back to reality.

“Is everything all right?” he asked when she didn’t immediately speak.

“Do you have coats?”

His brain felt sluggish, like he was about half a pace behind where he should be and it took him a few seconds to process that she needed to buy one.

“Oh, yes!” he replied, turning the key to let them back into the building. “Sorry, I just wasn’t – I do have a few, yes.”

He let her into the shop ahead of him. Luckily, it was warm in the store and she seemed to relax as soon as she was inside. He didn’t bother flipping the sign back to _OPEN_ , he would be going back out as soon as she was done.

“Dare I ask what happened to your old coat?” he asked her as he removed his own coat and gloves and set them on the counter.

“It’s a long story, but the short version is that I left it at a friend’s apartment when I had to go down the fire escape.”

“Was there a fire?”

“Well...no. Just a very, very pushy woman trying to enroll me in a pyramid scheme.”

“Ah, well, I can’t say I blame you for that.”

He had some women’s coats hanging in an antique wardrobe on the floor for both display purposes and because the cedar kept moths away and he made his way over to it and examined the contents. Out of the few things he had, some were obviously going to be too large for her and of the remaining ones one in particular stood out.

“Here, try this one,” he said pulling out the vintage swing coat. It was made of ivory wool and had a soft white fur collar and cuffs. It was a soft, feminine style coat and he thought it would suit her beautifully.

“Oh my,” she said breathlessly, reaching out and taking one of the arms to pet the soft fur. He always felt a little strange selling fur, but this coat was older than he was so hopefully she’d be okay with it.

He helped her into the coat and directed her towards one of the long mirrors throughout the store, and tried to find the sweet spot between watching and staring as she buttoned it up and hugged the warm wool to herself. The coat hit her knees, leaving just a small bit of her tights visible over her boots, and somehow that became the most interesting thing he’d ever seen in his life. He was far, far too old to be this absorbed in a woman putting on a jacket (if that was ever appropriate) but here he was being weird.

“This is so beautiful,” she said. “How much is it?”

He had to snap himself out of it, because he couldn’t hold numbers in his head along with this embarrassing display. “Uh...fifty?”

It was the only number he could think of off the top of his head, and probably about what he’d paid for the coat in the first place, but at least it would get her out of the door so he could start making sense of words again.

She had a pretty smile on her face when she unbuttoned the coat to reach the purse she still had slung under her shoulder underneath it and handed him a few bills he would need to make change from. And now he had to do _more_ math. Fantastic.

“Thank you so much for opening back up for me,” she said as she followed him to where the register was. “I don’t know what I’d have done without you.”

“Think nothing of it,” he replied. “I’m happy to have helped.”

She left with a little wave after receiving her change and putting the coat back together. He was so awkward, he couldn’t even stand it.

 

~❄~❄~❄~

 

Belle couldn’t help preening in her new coat all day. It felt glamorous and feminine and powerful, and that was something needed to feel. Gaston hadn’t called the entire time she’d been in Storybrooke, and she was honestly starting to hope that he wouldn’t. The longer she was here the more relaxed she felt. Something about being _home_ had a way of just stripping back all the pretense and artifice of life and allowed her to become a simpler version of herself, a _herself_ who it was so much easier to be.

She was on her way back to the bed & breakfast after dinner with her father, and feeling warm and comfortable. She probably shouldn’t have had that last glass of wine, but they’d been so happy for the moment, talking about past Christmases and memories and for a brief, beautiful moment it was like her mother had never died. Belle had wanted to cling to that for as long as she could. She refused to let her bad mood be soured by anything else, at least for a little while.

As she approached the pawn shop she saw Dominick Gold locking the front door, and she couldn’t resist jogging a little to catch up with him. She wasn’t really sure why she was so drawn to the man, but she was too tipsy and happy to really put that much thought into it and anyway, it was harmless.

“Hey, Mr. Gold!” she called out when she was just a few feet away. He turned and she barely had time to register him smiling at seeing her before she realized that the ground was icier than she’d thought and her heeled boots weren’t able to maintain traction, leaving her to skid into him.

They collapsed into the snow in a pile, and she couldn’t help but giggle at the predicament, which got him to laugh as well. It was such a _her_ thing to do, to trip into a man while trying to say hello.

“Are you all right?” she asked at last, once the worst of the giggles had passed.

“Yes, fine. You?”

“Never better. Sorry for running into you like that, I just meant to say hello.”

“Oh. Hello.”

She giggled again and started to stand up, only to slip back onto him when her shoe hit an ice patch. He let out a soft _oof_ sound and his arms wrapped around her in an almost instinctual way. It felt...right, somehow. Very, very, right. She couldn’t think about that too much, though, because if she did she was going to do something very stupid.

Belle only had to crane her neck a little to press her lips to his, and she felt his arms tighten around her before she could even second guess the reaction. The heady buzz of wine and laughter was carrying her through this stupid idea, and then he was kissing her back and she couldn’t even remember why she thought she’d regret it anyway. He was a good kisser, and the way his tongue dragged across her lips sent a thrill of excitement through her that she hadn’t anticipated. When she finally pulled away from the kiss she could still taste him on her lips, and he looked just as surprised as she felt. She knew this was a bad idea, but somehow all she could think of was how she just wanted to do it again.


End file.
